Local environmental agreements' contribution to sustainable land and transport development

We studied how the work of these agreements is coordinated between different levels of government and how state objectives and local action rooms are taken care of in the design of the agreements. We also want to focus on how regional plans for land and transport are safeguarded and incorporated into agreements and action packages in the urban environment agreements, and look into success factors for the coordination of regional plans and urban environment agreements to be successful. Finally, we wish to address barriers to the implementation of urban environment agreements and thereby the political feasibility of the agreements.

Integrated urban environment agreements involve the state, county municipalities and municipalities to achieve the goals set out in the national parliament climate settlement and in the National Transport Plan, NTP. This is especially true of the goal that all growth in passenger transport in metropolitan areas should be taken by public transport, bicycle and corridors. In the period 2014-2023, the government has set aside 16.9 billion for urban environment agreements, while 9.2 billion is allocated to the reward scheme for better public transport. These two are intended to form an overall order in the long term, and both target the largest urban areas in Norway, defined by the networking of the cities of the future. Urban environment agreements can be seen as a further development of the city package scheme. While the city packages were mainly a tool for financing road infrastructure investments, urban environment agreements are a tool that also includes traffic control measures and area development of importance to transport.

The government has decided to merge the urban environment agreements with the urban development agreements, and the new agreement will be hot springs. In this project we will be able to follow the development of the urban environment agreements that have already been established, and the development of the new urban road signs that are now being negotiated in the Stavanger area / Nordjæren and the Bergens area.

The project was a collaboration between CICERO - Center for Climate Research, NIBR - Norwegian Institute of Urban and Regional Research and TØI - Transportøkonomisk Institutt.